October 2001

Random Profile:
Rich Rotunno

Rich Rotunno and his wife, Gayl Gray. They met in the ML library.
(Photo by Carlye Calvin.)

Every other month, Staff Notes Monthly spotlights a
stochastically chosen staff member. This month we profile Richard
Rotunno, a senior scientist in the Mesoscale and Microscale
Meteorology Division.

Man in the middle:

Rich has been carrying out research at NCAR since he arrived as a
postdoc in 1976. He focuses on mesoscale phenomenatornadoes,
squall lines, gust fronts, and the like. The prefix "meso" means
middle, which gives Rich plenty of leeway to shift to smaller or
larger scales. "I've worked in just about every area of mesoscale
research. There's a very broad middle."

It wasn't always weather:

As a youngster, Rich wasn't spellbound by the sky, as so many
colleagues were. Instead, "I loved reading bookshistory,
literature." Rich's family moved from Manhattan to central Long
Island in 1957, when one could still find a duck farm or a
deserted beach to explore. He decided to go into engineering,
"mainly because I thought it would be a good living." Rich
attended the State University of New York at Stony Brook, earning
his undergraduate degree in engineering science with an eye toward
aeronautical engineering.

The road to NCAR:

Rich's mentor at SUNY-Stony Brook was engineering professor Robert
Cees, who "got me into research." Cees was also the one who
delivered life-altering news to Rich and his classmates one
morning in April 1971. "Congress had decided to veto the
supersonic transport [which would have been the American
equivalent to the Concorde]. Bob came in and said 'I don't know if
you have to know any of this stuffsupersonic flow
theoryany more.' " With the job market for aerospace
engineers suddenly kaput, "I decided to retool. I knew I liked
fluid mechanics, and environmental fluid mechanics seemed to be
happening."

The natural place for Rich to take up graduate studies was
Princeton University. It had close ties to the Geophysical Fluid
Dynamics Laboratorythe birthplace of numerical weather
prediction. "Bill Holland [now retired from CGD] taught the
oceanography course I took." Gradually, Rich's interest shifted
toward the atmosphere, and upon finishing his doctorate he headed
west to Boulder and NCAR.

He was a chaser before chasing was cool:

As an ASP postdoc, Rich hooked up with mentor Doug Lilly in the
Small-Scale Analysis and Prediction Program. The program was then
housed on the mesa and separate from the Convective Storms
Division; the two entities would later merge to form MMM. Rich
quickly became entranced by the mysterious physics driving
tornadoes: "It had a lot of gut appeal." In 1977, Doug took a
sabbatical at the Cooperative Institute for Research in
Environmental Sciences to plan a field project, and Rich followed.
At CIRES, Rich continued using numerical simulations to study
vortex flows that were created in tornado chambers at the
University of Oklahoma and Purdue University.

On a trip to Oklahoma, Rich also got a taste of storm chasing. The
field was then limited to a handful of people who had very little
data to work with. "Chasing was kind of a primitive thing in those
days. I remember having to stop at a phone booth and call someone
who'd rattle off data from the surface charts. No Weather Channel,
no laptops." Despite the limitations, he managed to see his first
tornado at Shamrock, Texas, on 9 May 1977.

Peak research experience:

Rich's modeling collaboration in the early 1980s with MMM
colleague Joe Klemp on the three-dimensional structure of
supercell thunderstorms was "a confluence of events. Computers
were becoming fast enough and we were becoming bold enough to ask,
Why can't we simulate a 3-D thunderstorm?" Their analysis became a
touchstone for other work and is still part of the training for
weather forecasters and other specialists. "Not only did we
discover some new things about tornadic storms, [but] those
discoveries had some practical use as well. It's satisfying as an
engineer to make something that people use." On the tropical
cyclone front, Rich earned the AMS Banner I. Miller Award in 1992
for his paper with Kerry Emanuel (Massachusetts Institute of
Technology) on the relationship between sea-surface temperature
and the inner dynamics of hurricanes.

Kismet in the stacks:

When Rich walked into the ML library one day in 1977, he didn't
know he was about to meet his future life partner, Gayl Gray (now
NCAR's acting chief librarian). "I was asking for a report by Ted
Fujita. I think it was on the Fargo tornado [of 1957]. I think it
only existed as a tech memo. She had to do some searching, but she
found it, and we've lived happily ever after."

Bella Italia:

Gayl and Rich both love to travel. In 1992, they went to
Agrigento, Sicily, where they met members of Rich's extended
family. Another family reunion happened in Milan two years ago
while Rich was taking part in the Mesoscale Alpine Project. The
couple's other favorite destinations include any place with ocean
waves and sandy beaches.

The never-ending reading list:

A true bibliophile, Rich swaps books and recommendations with MMM
colleagues Charlie and Nancy Knight and other friends. He favors
histories, essays, novels, and short stories, including Italian
literature. "Richard Burton had a diary of all the books he'd
read. I used to want to do thatbut if I started right now,
I'd neglect all the ones I read before. So I've never started
one."